No, this isn’t a “what if?” or alternative history scenario that I’m trying to work out. I’ve Googled this question to East St. Louis and back, and have had no luck finding an answer … that is, if there’s an answer.
So, what’s the question? Did the Nazis have plans for invading and conquering North America, and if so, what plans did they have for ruling over the place?
So you think that Hitler and his advisors had developed some plan to cross the Atlantic to attack and conquer a nation that it likely would never had the resources to occupy?
Perhaps the Germans had some pie in the sky plans, but they had enough trouble getting across the English Channel.
No cite but I remember reading somewhere that the Nazi’s and Imperial Japan had rough plans to split North America at the Rockies and each keep half.
Haj
<<No cite but I remember reading somewhere that the Nazi’s and Imperial Japan had rough plans to split North America at the Rockies and each keep half. >>
As I remember, that was debunked on this message board (Somewhere) as just being a propaganda piece, either from the U.S. or U.K. government. In any case, a similar post-war split-up was a feature of the sci-fi novel “The Man in the High Castle.”
I think the Nazi plans were to just keep conquering one chunk of the world at a time, but I don’t know if they’d planned any farther than Britain-Russia-Africa. I don’t know about Japan’s long-range plans, although I don’t think they had any outside of Asia and the Pacific.
Ranchoth
I remember reading in wargaming magazines (don’t remember if it was Strategy and Tactics or The Wargamer) several years ago a series of article on German war plans, one being the invasion of North America code-named Case Geld. I don’t remember how serious the plan was or if it was one of those theoretical staff exercises.
I don’t know if this qualifies as “invading and conquering” or not, but the Germans did send some saboteurs to the U.S. in 1942 with the goal of crippling American industry. They failed, obviously. The Atlantic Monthly has a whole article devoted to this in their February 2002 issue.
In realistic terms, the biggest overseas invasion planned by WW2 Germany was Sealion, the invasion of the British Isles, which was only a half-assed plan anyway. Hitler expected the British to make peace at some point, so didn’t think there would be much trouble from that direction. AFAIK, there were no concrete plans by Germany to invade the US - Hitler expected the US to enter the war, do a little bit of ineffective fighting, and then fold up. IMO this was because Hitler envisioned Germany ruling europe, ‘racially pure’ Britain ruling her empire, America crumbling, and the Japanese either having their own sphere or being crushed by the British (I don’t remember which).
Hitler’s big dream was to have all ‘Germanic’ countries annexed to Germany and German domination of the rest of central/western Europe. Germany would also extend through Eastern Europe to the Urals; the slavs (pretty much the Poles and Russians) would be castrated and used as slave labor while German settlers filled in Russia to the Urals. Russians would be left past the urals so that they’d keep fighting Germany, providing a continuous low-key war to make future generations stronger. And, of course, all of this area would be Judenfrei. Eventually this would make Germans strong enough to take over everything, but that was a ‘thousand year’ goal.
(And note that I’m just reporting on historical fact here, I certainly don’t believe any of those views.
Further, the Nazis weren’t all that big on planning. Their policies always had an ad hoc quality, as A.J.P. Taylor has shown. Pretty much, they’d try one thing and see if it worked. If it did (and in the early years of the war, it usually did), they’d try something else. If the Nazis had defeated Britain and the Soviet Union, then they might have started thinking about the U.S. (though most likely through Mexico or Canada instead of invading the U.S.).
Hitler’s purpose in life was the destruction of the communist movement of Europe in general and the destruction of Soviet Russia in particular. He was obsessed with it, and told everyone about his plans at least as early as 1934. He especially wanted the British to know to keep them from rearming. That worked. It also kept the French bourgeiosie happy during the thirties.
For more details read “The Nazi Connection” by F. W. Winterbotham.
I went to Panama City, FL last year and was told that the German submariners off the coast of Florida would actually send a few of there folks a shore to get groceries. I thought this fellow was pulling my leg, but he was pretty adamant about it. Who knows if its true, but an interesting story if anything.
I do remember seeing something on the History Channel about the Japanese patroling the coast of California in their submarines. Apparently, we actually had some of our troops patrol the beaches looking for those guys. Don't forget about the balloon bombs that did kill a few of our people in the Northwest.
Who knows what the historians will turn up as more information becomes available.A lot of what the Germans did in World War II appears to me to be a sort of overcompensation for the perceived mistakes they made in World War I. In the 1930s, one of those mistakes was thought to be Germany’s strict adherance to the Schlieffen Plan, the stragegic plan for the invasion of France via Belgium. In the interwar years it had become common knowledge that everyone knew the details of the Schlieffen Plan at least a year before World War I started.
The Wehrmacht, and Hitler, seem therefore to have avoided serious long-range planning. Plans for an invasion of Poland weren’t made until mid-1939. Plans for the invasion of Norway weren’t made until after the war started. Planning for the invasion of France and the Low Countries wasn’t started until early 1940 (and perhaps unsuprisingly because of the short lead-time, the Germans closely followed the original 1905 version of the Schlieffen Plan, which included the invasion of the Netherlands). The invasion of France was well under way before the Germans conceived their “river crossing on a grand scale” which was to be Operation Sea Lion. Sea Lion was canned in part because Hitler redirected the planning staff toward the invasion of the Soviet Union, with a brief hiatus to outline the investment of the Balkans, Greece, and Crete. Once the Soviet Union was invaded in June 1941, Germany began to react rather than act, and any military plans for an invasion of the Americas are likely only fanciful doodles, if there are any at all.
However, Hitler did appear have a private, long-range strategic plan known as the Stufenplan, which I know little about. The overall strategic plan appears to be to gain control of Europe first, then defeat the Soviets, and finally turn to face America.
I’m not sure if that idea comes directly from Hitler or from some ambitious scholar’s extrapolation from Hitler’s statements and writings. Personally, I think Hitler’s plans for world domination were more closely akin to Charlie Chaplin’s antics with the inflateable globe in The Great Dictator.
We’ve discussed this before here in GQ, but you’ll have to do the search for the threads yourself.
Both Japanese and German submarines made attacks on the Americas during WWII. The Japanese attacks include one on a California oil refinery and a submarine-launched seaplane that attacked Brookings, Oregon. German submarines made attacks in the Caribbean including one on Puerto Rico, I think. I don’t think they made any on the US mainland, though.
That stuff about buying groceries doesn’t seem too far fetched. As long as they had someone reasonably fluent in English and without a heavy German accent, they could have gotten away with it fairly easily. The coasts were not heavily defended or even under continual surveilance.
Detailed information on German military planning or Hitler’s thinking with regards to the United States is hard to find. The conclusions I’ve gleaned as to why they declared war on the US are thus:
-Hitler wanted to help his Japanese allies–since they were now both at war with Britain–and hoped they would reciprocate by atacking the USSR from the east.
-American neutrality was inconveniencing the U-boat campaign against Atlantic shipping. Hitler wanted to be able to attack American escorts and make attacks in US territorial waters.
-Axis strategy vis-a-vis the US was all about keeping us confined to our own side of either ocean. This required eliminating our ability to cross them. The Japanese went a long way toward that goal at Pearl Harbor and promised to finish off the US fleet–and major portions of the British–while the U-boats would take care of the US merchant marine.
-Hitler and the Japanese both figured that Americans were ‘soft’ and would accept these losses and retreat into isolationism. Ultimately, they believed the US and Britain would adopt a 'can’t lick 'em so join ‘em’ attitude. The world would be ruled by a 5 power ‘club’ with Germany dominating Europe, Japan dominating East Asia, Italy the Mediterranean, Britain its existing empire, and the US the Americas.
Only once the US showed it was capable of striking back did the Axis look for ways to bring the war to US soil. These mainly consisted of plans to mount long-range air attacks, and these did include the possiblity of nuclear or biolgical attacks, but here too the goal was still to knock the US out of the war, not to ‘take away our freedom’.
re OP I’ve seen no plans it may have been allied propaganda because I definitely saw a 1950’s "newsy’ film that had a cartoon graphic implying that the Nazi’s would spilt N. America with the Japanese
Having said that, I saw the Red Army exhibit that contained of a lot of the stuff they took out of one of Hitler’s office (IIRC was it the Chancellery??). Anyway, on Hitler’s desk was a globe. On the globe’s North America was a fairly crudely graffitied in Swastika under which was written something in German. The Museum guidebook translated it as “I am Coming”.
One of the creepiest and most chilling things I’d ever seen. There was GIANT disclaimer that this had been in Soviet possession 50 years and shown to high western officials at the end of the war, so it may have been etched there by the “Reds” (speaking of ‘50’s movies). If this weren’t the SDMB fwiw I’d say it didn’t “feel” like a soviet trick.
I’d agree that Hitler’s immediate military plans were fairly ad hoc.
But he did in fact have a more general plan, the first stages of which he was able to successully carry out until the disasterous invasion of the USSR. I might be wrong, but some of this plan might be spelled out in “Mein Kampf”.
Basically, Hitler felt that WWII would last unitl about 1950. The late stages of the war would include an American invasion But I’ve never heard of any specific invasion plans. He did make the following comments: “The Americans make very nice cars but they can’t fight a war.” and that, after the successful defeat of England and the USSR, he would “deal with the Americans”.
By the way, the above info is from Shirer’s “The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich”.
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I read in a book (think it was Beevor’s “Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege”) that Hitler hadn’t planned for WWII to start until 1945. Any confirmation of thus?
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I REALLY doubt this, seeing as Hitler was aching to attack Poland and got very upset when the attack had to be put off for a week or so. What the fuck was Germany going to be doing until 1945? Building up their armed forces? They could only build them up so far, and the Allies would surely have noticed this buildup and started asking questions, which probably would have led Hitler to start the war.
Hitler probably didn’t think that WW II would start until '45. Up until the time that he invaded Poland, Europe had pretty much rolled over to everything that he’d done, so he no doubt thought that they’d do the same thing for some time to come. His generals advised him to wait until 1942 before acting because they didn’t feel that the technological and equipment level of the military would be up to par until then.